James Poulos writes about political news, focusing on our choices for liberty and our options for reform. He's a columnist at The Daily Beast, the host of the Free Radicals podcast, and the frontman of a band called Black Hi-Lighter.

Well, within the something. Terms have consequences, but Krugman, no mere political theorist, has no time for even a layman’s taxonomy of the vast swath of American thought he discredits with such empyrean relish. I suspect what Krugman really means is that Republican party orthodoxy is still strictly enforced and policed, and that the Party insists that the Party is right about whatever the Party happens officially to “believe” at any one time. And since, “essentially,” I actually agree with Krugman on this — if indeed that’s what Krugman believes — in the spirit of friendly combat I will do him the favor of sketching out how it could be that I exist and why my existence, despite his sweeping dismissal of my “reformish” cohort, reveals his major malfunction.

Krugman’s damning judgment, apparently honed and refined in the pure flame of intellectual precision, is actually the product of a style of thinking about the political right in America so sloppy and careless that it approaches the madcap. For Krugman, the issue of whether to embrace or reject his “liberal” position on climate change, stimulus, austerity, money-printing, inflationary risk, revenue, tax cuts, and “the workability of universal health care” is settled by “the pretty much overwhelming” empirical evidence. The only reason to disagree, therefore, is partisan animosity. That’s why, when non-liberals like Bruce Bartlett or Josh Barro dare to take seriously that ‘liberal position,’ they are “immediately branded as ‘no longer conservatives,’ in a sort of inverted version of the none-dare-call-it-treason effect.” Wait: Republicans who urge that the Party embrace liberalizing reforms are attacked for abandoning conservatism? How could this be?

The answer, of course, is — as Josh, for one, repeatedly attests — that they were never really conservatives to begin with. In the “good old days,” not-so-conservative people used to feel right at home in the Republican party, as so many liberals love to explain. As I’ve argued here at Forbes, the Republican party is still defined by a coalition of Church people, Chamber of Commerce people, and Military people. And as anyone who has so much as flipped through an issue of Reason or The American Conservative can report — this is an exercise Krugman seems never once to have tried — there are plenty of each kind of person controlling the GOP who are, despite their identity group, in no important way politically conservative.

Shocked by this claim? Don’t be. We all know the types: the religious fundamentalist who rejects constitutionalism, strict construction, originalism, limited government, and other politically conservative precepts when they stand in the way of the legal enforcement of their moral rules; the Wall Streeter or businessman who rejects political conservatism when there’s riches to be made, influence to be bought, or sweetheart deals with Washington to be sealed, the better to capture its regulatory regimes; or the functionary in the military-industrial complex who stands for whatever bit of rhetoric puts a successful shine on the projection of American power deep and wide around the world. Since the beginning, these types have thrived in the Republican party; they have defined it. Sure — there have been holdouts in the Church, Commerce, and Military wings of the party who have actually also put politically conservative governing principles before their own self-interest. But how often, and for how long, have they held the day?

There’s an answer to that question: so rarely and so fleetingly that, for those as ignorant of the history of political thought as Paul Krugman, they are not thought to exist.

But exist they do. Some of them (horrors!) wave Gadsden flags. Some of them hung out on your freeway overpass, draping around those Ron Paul rEVOLution banners. Some of them — ahem — hang out at places like Forbes and Vice, making the case month in and month out that the Republican party is doomed unless it realizes the anthropologies it’s peddling don’t move or inspire enough Americans. The policy is subsidiary, these latter sorts of people exclaim. Policy isn’t garbage, but it isn’t gold, either. If you can’t get people on board with your implicit or explicit account of what it means to be human, all the wonkery in the world won’t save your beloved party.

Yet Krugman does not seem able to think — yet — that these people exist. He wants us to believe that I — for instance — must either accept his liberal position and be run out of the American right, or, conversely, that I must reject his position for no reason other than a desire to remain in the right’s good graces. For Krugman, since the empirical evidence proves that the liberal position is correct, assent is required, since there’s no reasoned basis to disagree. For various political thinkers on the right, however — sniff them out not only at AmCon, but at Reason, at The Claremont Institute, and (horrors!!) some of the mainstream movement conservative mags — empirics does not settle foundational political questions.

No matter how much our policy expertise resembles a massive supersharp katana blade, you cannot eat soup with a knife, and when we are being human in a political manner, the character of our activity cannot be exhausted or defined solely by the exercise of policy planning and implementation. That’s a lesson some close to the wonkocracy, like public interest law professor Jonathan Turley, are finally beginning to teach the public. “Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances,” he warns, “is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.” For that, you can thank the wonkocrats. Despite their best efforts, policy planning and implementation cannot digest or substitute for prudential judgment, statecraft, wisdom, or (horrors!!!) upholding and defending the Constitution. These things which policy cannot usurp or negate are the very bone marrow of the content of conservatism. Because Krugman does not see these things as authoritative or even legitimate sources of objection to empirical policymaking — if he even sees them at all — he believes that they, and whatever party where they hope to find a home, are an intellectual vacuum.

His evidence for this conclusion — of course he has evidence — would conform to the pattern set by, say, the debate surrounding climate change. For either there is anthropogenic climate change or there is not, and if the empirical study says that there is — and it does — then, by Gaia, we are going to have a policy designed to “combat” climate change. It will be the best such policy, in fact, because we will have the best experts creating it; and they will be sure it’s the best, not only because they are themselves the best at creating such policies, but because they will be extra-motivated by the existential threat to human life posed by the accumulated human impact on our environment.

As I put it just the other day, look how quickly the path of progress narrows the moment we step out of its way. Instead of a riot of policy biodiversity, the wonkocracy gives us despotically narrow and precise instructions, condemning us to the idiot class if we raise so much as the mildest objection — not to the description wonkocrats hand us, but to the prescription they always say must of necessity follow. Gone from the debate — because there are no grounds for debate! — are a host of important questions that even a person who accepts the science of climate change might raise. Is there a human right to live in Bangladesh? Is there a human right to live in Palm Beach? How much climate change is too much? How great a rise in the seas? Within what period of time? If climate change is an existential crisis, shouldn’t we consider threatening to bomb China unless they accept the imposition of harsh climate-preserving terms? Would we be better off throwing our energies into a vast moral program to change our energy habits, rather than adopting a cap-and-trade scheme that plays into the hands of the crony capitalists who’ve burned us so often before? These basic questions are so unsettling that they may strike many people as frighteningly bizarre. (That suggests just how estranged so many of us have become from the practice of actual political thought.) How much simpler it is to assign governance to the experts, who will emerge from their office buildings with actionable plans, which we can then accept or contest, safe from worrying which fundamental human issues we are arguing over without ever thinking through.

This pattern repeats across all Krugman’s categories, and all issues of public life. One reason to keep taxes on the ultra-wealthy reasonably high is to help control human envy, a deathly danger to all regimes, and to prevent people from developing unmanageable, destructive delusions of grandeur. But that rationale stems from an anthropology where political thought in the classical sense matters far more than public policy in the modern sense. Krugman would throw it out, no matter how conservative it is — and believe me, it expresses one of the most conservative patterns of thought ever to be found in human history. One reason to ignore the Laffer curve is that it’s an abstraction a wonk sketched out on a napkin, without regard to the historical, cultural, social, moral, and political particulars of the humans he sought to impose it on. That captures a quintessentially conservative insight. But for Krugman, it is either a phony thought or a nonthought. One reason to resist a Krugtron-sized stimulus, as I’ve said before, is that even if the economics ‘work on paper’, they realistically threaten to destroy the economy by convincing a critical mass of Americans that their economy is an unreal thought experiment that divorces official value from actual, real-life value. Here’s another conservative mode of thought that has nothing to do with accepting or rejecting empirical research. But no. It cannot exist. One reason to oppose the implementation of Obamacare, even if it is in some final sense “workable,” is that policy has no intelligible way of describing to us how we would know, without simply referring to policymakers, when the implementation of Obamacare is not workable. Another conservative insight, another human practice that must, under the glare of His Invincibleness, be negated. The list goes on and on.

This stuff is antimatter for Paul Krugman, and one gets the impression that, likewise, if some jerkwad threw a bucket of it onto Paul Krugman, he would zap into a hole in the time-space continuum.

Nevertheless — and here is where the rubber really meets the road — Krugman, to reiterate, is quite right if he believes that the Republican party likes to disparage and dismiss folks who express conservative thought in ways not adequately worshipful of the GOP and whichever policies it happens to support at the time. This painful lesson has been learned, by turns, by some conservatives who are on the outs with the Republican party establishment for reasons that have nothing to do with accepting liberal-friendly empirics. Conservative Republicans who care in a foundational way about the separation of powers, the size and scope of government, the reality of civil liberties, and other such curios of a bygone era are “essentially” captives of a party machine that will never meaningfully risk its power on their behalf. Something similar happens from time to time on the left, as guys like Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill make plain.

Huh? What? Oh yeah — there are actually some liberals who make judgments about how to govern for reasons that don’t issue from the pulpit of wonkocracy. On a whole host of issues, in fact, the dictates of Krugtron the Invincible are more or less irrelevant — which is why he speaks so little about them. What Krugman cannot abide, like all wonks of his ilk, is that alternate logics of governance exist even in the realms of public life where his expertise holds such apparent sway.

As I said just those couple of days ago, the best way to prove a wonkocrat wrong is to give him his way and wait. Just so, the best way to slay Krugtron the Invincible is to allow him to try to be right about everything. Even if neither I nor another “reformish conservative” can land a blow against him, in his effort to swat us away he has succeeded only in knocking himself on his ass.

My fellow “reformish conservatives” are big kids, and I won’t presume to speak on their behalf. As for myself, I’ll be over here in this alleged intellectual void, continuing to challenge Republicans (and others) to consider presenting a “radicaltarian” anthropology that all Americans can believe in — or risk dying on the hill of policy squabbles so unmoored from the fundamentals of being human that Americans far more consequential than Paul Krugman will cease to believe in their party.

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But here’s the thing – by your own admission, repeatedly within this article, dissenters to the republican orthodoxy are so marginalized and stifled by that orthodoxy, that they might as well not exist.

So how is it unreasonable to work from that base? Unless you are John the Baptist, nobody, even your fellow conservatives, cares if you are a lone voice crying out in the woods.

Sure, you seem to take umbrage at the fact that Krugman dismisses any efforts at moderating the God/Gold/Guns caucus, but if you admit your efforts are amounting to nil, then why take umbrage at all?

Ultimately, you are venting your own frustrations on Krugman for being mean to you. But if a tree falls in the woods…

I think Mr. Poulos is giving too much credit to the party machine these days. Seems to me the GOP is full of people, wonks, journos, and politicos, who are not buying the party line/ corporate message like they did in the Bush era. Rand Paul to Chris Christie to Bobby Jindal represents a relatively wide swatch (meant to do swath but swatch works too) of conservative thought and all three have periodically been in or out of the “Party” graces.

One reason to oppose the implementation of Obamacare, even if it is in some final sense “workable,” is that policy has no intelligible way of describing to us how we would know, without simply referring to policymakers, when the implementation of Obamacare is not workable.

^^^^ This. (don’t know if the italics will show up above)

The definition of science. Falsifiability. Economics is not science. But because it uses dense mathematical language it can be used to obfuscate thought. Hence, the favorite vehicle for wonkocracy.

Aside: read mathematical writings of physicists in comparison. (Usually) not complexity for the sake of complexity, but distils down to the essential math.

Just finished reading Niall Ferguson’s “Krugtron Trilogy” before your engaging and enlightening editorial. Thanks so much. “I’m not a Conservative. I’m a Libertarian with a Capital L, and a republican with a small r.” -Uncle Milty Friedman